Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, science on November 5, 2014| 1 Comment »
There is something magical about flying through clouds. They look so solid, but they’re not. It’s impossible to be sure about their edges….where does a cloud begin? Where does it end? Despite their absence of a solid nature they make pretty impressive shadows on the Earth below. And they are in a state of constant becoming, perpetual change.
I saw these particular ones above the Garonne as the plane was landing in Bordeaux carrying me to the next big chapter of Life.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on October 29, 2014| 1 Comment »
I find Plato’s three “transcendentals” of Beautiful, Good and True a very fruitful concept to explore. When I first read about “integral theory” I was very taken by Ken Wilber’s four quadrants of the single-subjective, plural-subjective, single-objective and plural-subjective, and really liked the way the beautiful, the good and the true could be mapped onto that. (read a little more about that here)
Yesterday as I was looking through my photographs of autumn leaves I was enjoying finding the ones I considered to be the most beautiful.
The day before I was listening to a radio discussion about fairness. The concept of fairness seems to be innate, and the panel discussed a video of an experiment which seems to show how fairness is indeed innate in primates.
Last week I was struck again by the observation that most people seem to visit a doctor to make sense of something. In the Medical World, we refer to that making sense as ‘diagnosis’, and I’ve long since preferred to think of it as an understanding. Making sense of a pain, an itch, a dizziness, of anxiety or whatever, involves the co-creation of a credible story by the doctor and the patient working together.
As these three strands came together for me this morning, I got to thinking of the beautiful, the good and the true once more and two things occur to me.
Firstly, all three of these qualities are dynamic and relative. None of them are fixed. And none of them are universal at the level of the individual or particular. What is beautiful to me, might not be experienced as beautiful by you (on the other hand, we might agree!) And I don’t see beauty as a category either – at least, not as a yes or no kind of category – not as an either/or way of thinking. It’s not a box to tick.
Secondly, for me, I think the Good has a strong element of fairness. We tend to think of Justice as being about fairness, and it strikes me that I can ask myself how fair my judgements and actions are, as a way of considering how good they are. I do also think that the quality of integration is a key characteristic of all complex adaptive systems i.e. all living organisms, so an action or choice is better if it is more integrative (if it increases the mutually beneficial bonds between the well differentiated parts)
Thirdly, I see Truth as being about sense making. In some ways, the sense I make of my experience is the truth of it.
So, my current exploration of the beautiful, the good and the true, centres around wonder (émerveillement), fairness and integration, and sense-making.
I discover beauty through wonder. I am motivated to promote fairness and integration in the world. I make sense through the creation of narratives.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on October 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I’ve taken lots of photos of autumn leaves over the years, but this one remains one of my all time favourites. I thought about it today because with the sudden drop in temperature coupled with pretty wild gusts of wind over the last couple of days here in Scotland, there are autumn leaves covering the ground everywhere. So, just before they all go from the trees, I thought I’d share this spectacular burst of colour again.
This particular forest is in Kyoto where the autumn colours really are spectacular, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find similar spectacles near you.
I love the vibrancy of LIFE which shines through these leaves almost as if the glow is from within the leaves themselves…
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on October 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In “The Secret Life of Pronouns”, the psychologist, James Pennebaker discusses two different kinds of thinker – categorical or dynamic. I hadn’t heard of this distinction before but in the briefest of nutshells –
A categorical thinker is someone who tends to focus on objects, things, and categories. The opposite end of this dimension are people who are more dynamic in their thinking. When thinking dynamically, people are describing action and changes
That sounds very familiar to me. In fact, its got a lot in common with Iain McGilchrist’s left and right hemisphere approaches to life. The left hemisphere RE-presents reality to itself, labelling, listing, naming, categorising. Whereas the right hemisphere focuses on what he calls “the between-ness”, connections, relationships, or the whole.
For the last few months, I’ve been sharing on this blog a series of posts under the title “The A to Z of Becoming” where I take one verb each week for you to think about, and play with. I deliberately chose verbs because I think it’s the “doing words”, the “action words” which determine the kind of life we experience. This is partly in tune with William Glasser’s Choice Theory, and partly with Deleuze’s focus on change, or difference, which provided me with the fundamental principle of this blog – “becoming not being”.
So, there is something insightful about this distinction, but, the way my mind works, I also find myself balking at the “two value” use of “or” – I SO much prefer “and”! (Which is something I picked up from the General Semanticists, before I even heard of Deleuze.
So, maybe now I can be more aware of when I am thinking categorically and when I’m thinking dynamically (and, yes, I DO have a preference!)
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on October 13, 2014| Leave a Comment »
The other day I came across these bird footprints in the sand…
……then a couple of days later I saw this pattern on an old door….
bird prints….plant prints…..
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on October 12, 2014| 1 Comment »
In the second part of the A to Z of Becoming, O stands for Observe.
My first thought was to write again about using a camera. I carry a camera everywhere and have done for years. I find that if I have the camera in my hand I take a lot more photographs (I mean instead of carrying it in my bag and getting it out each time to use it). I have repeatedly had the experience that a conscious choice to have the camera in my hand increases my power of observation……I notice more when I have a thought about maybe taking photos. These days almost everyone has a camera with them all the time – in their smartphone. But sometimes you have to remind yourself that you do really have that camera with you…..it’s not just a phone!
But my second thought has been stimulated by reading James Pennebaker’s Secret Life of Pronouns. Pennebaker is a psychologist and in that book he describes an interesting experiment he did years ago. He attached a small video camera to a baseball hat then got students to put the hat on, walk a block from the college to the drugstore, buy some chewing gum, then walk back. Afterwards, they watched the videos. What they saw was fascinating. One video was almost exclusively of the pavement, as the student hardly looked up. Another couple showed the students were checking out any members of the opposite sex who passed by. And in one there was a very long shot of the chewing gum display as the student stood for ages trying to work out which gum to buy.
His point was that no two students observed the world in the same way because their personalities affected what they observed.
I’ve thought something similar before when you think about the conversations you hear after a group of friends have been to see the same movie, and you think “did we all actually see the SAME movie?”. There are many things which affect how we experience the world, but not least is what we observe.
So your challenge for this week, should you choose to accept it, is to observe your observations. Take some time to see what you’ve been seeing today. You can do that either by carrying a camera and taking photos through the day, then looking at the set in the evening, or by taking notes through the day…..writing down little observations, things which catch your attention, then reading through the notes at the end of the day.
Observe your observations. Become aware of what is catching your attention.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on October 10, 2014| 1 Comment »
Sometimes I describe myself as “insatiably curious”. I suppose I have an instinct for what’s different, unique or unusual. And I find all of those things every day.
I’ve no idea what this is in this photo I took. It was pretty small but the colour made it stand out in the grass. Now that I can see it more clearly in this photo it’s even more beautiful, even more curious, than it was when I was taking the picture.
Amazing! Isn’t life just full of such uniqueness and diversity?
Posted in books, from the dark room, from the living room, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography on October 2, 2014| 1 Comment »
Little drops of water shining so brilliantly on a leaf are not just like gemstones, they are like little lenses.
It’s good couple of decades since I read “Lens of Perception“, but I remember being very taken with the author’s metaphor of the lens. We can only experience the world from our unique, subjective viewpoint, and our perception is continuously influenced by not only our personal make up and characteristics, but by our stories – created from our past experiences, memories, beliefs and values and by our imagination (so full of fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams and expectations).
It’s good to become aware of those lenses we wear all the time – we see the whole of Life through them.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography on September 24, 2014| Leave a Comment »
If you use a fast shutter speed on your camera you can make the water flowing over a weir look like it has momentarily become solid. The water in this photo almost looks like icicles. It’s beautiful and it catches our attention but it misrepresents reality.
Movies are made of millions of single images like this. We run them past our vision so fast that we think we are seeing a moving image. But we aren’t. We’re seeing a series of still images, one frame after another.
Philosophers including Bergson and Deleuze have pointed out that reality is not like this. It’s not made up of discrete moments all stitched together. Instead reality flows…….continuously and unceasingly. Isolating a single moment is wonderful but it can trap us into thinking that life is made of single moments.
To begin to experience life differently, begin to notice the flow, and be aware of when you are isolating a moment in that flow.
Becoming not being.
Life flows.
It’s not like the movies.
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography on September 18, 2014| 2 Comments »
I love rainbows.
I love how a rainbow only appears when we are standing in the right place looking in the right direction.
There’s no rainbow without the viewer.
There’s no rainbow which lasts for ever. It shimmers, it deepens, it fades, you can’t find the start or the end of it (you’ll never know if there is a bucket of gold hidden there!)
It’s the symbol of hope, of promise and of diversity.
I love it’s transience, because transience heightens the present moment.
Immerse yourself in today.
Heroes Not Zombies 